A perfectly paced, amazing looking, great game that shows what all action adventure games should aspire to be.
From the off this game will grip you. The story is great and the voice acting may well be the best ever put down for a game. The reason for this is simple; that the game draws upon all the rich character history from the comics and the voice actors from the animated series. Although Arkham Asylum is in no way based upon the recent movie revamp of the series, it is significantly based upon the one shot comic 'Killing Joke' by Alan Moore and in my opinion strikes the perfect balance between the cartoonish aspects of the early comics and the latter day darker undertones.
Combat in the game is easy to pick up and the progression in difficulty throughout the story is perfectly estimated to challenge but not frustrate the player. Controls are fairly basic at the start, in that you have one button to strike and another to counter and you can add in extra attacks you have trained later on. However the game never degenerates into button bashing, hand to hand combat being largely based around establishing a smooth rhtym of strikes and counters in fights and it is eminently satisying to take down a large group of enemies without being hit once. Again here, the balance is subtle, your strikes feel slick and powerful but one knife strike you missed reminds you how vulnerable Batman is.
Aside from hand to hand combat the other main form of action is in the form of predator mode. This is generally the shift in pace which occurs when you come across a room of gun wielding enemies, where you must grapple from gargoyle to gargoyle, silently taking down isolated thugs. Although I never enjoyed these as much as the visceral thrill of the close combat, they serve to break up the action well and lead to some tense moment when you are discovered and must either fight or flee into the shadows. The moments when you must use stealth are made obvious to you also, and you will never be placed in the frustrating situation of having no cover when this happens.
Although the story powers along fairly quickly, you are also given the opportunity of solving several riddles along the way, using the alternate detective mode of vision. Although none of these are necessary to complete the game, they are really fun to find and generally give you some interesting backstory to some of the characters as well. I hope that when they make the sequel these are made an even larger part of the game as they were all fun and do help flesh out the story, as well as helping make the most of the games expansive environments.
This brings me onto probably my one gripe with Arkham Asylum and the only reason I couldn't give it a 10. The visuals depicting the mental hospital and it's surroundings are incredible. Some gamers may know that the graphics engine is the latest Unreal engine, similar to the ones used in Bioshock and Gears of War and their sequels. For me Arkham Asylum looks even better than those games and if you're playing it on PC, doesn't need a monster machine to look amazing. The problem is that detective mode, the alternate vision mode, which strips away all the detail and reduces all characters to wireframes is just too useful. It highlights grapple points, lets you see enemies through walls and reveals riddle clues, all of which you have no way of seeing easily in normal vision. This encourages you to play pretty much the entire game in detective mode which just doesn't look good. Hopefully in the sequel they will find some way of making the detective mode a little less obtrusive.
However aside from this small gripe I have to say I was blown away. The entire game is gripping, smoothly paced, dark and satisfying to play through.